Best quarter sheet pans

Why anyone buys this size

A quarter sheet is not a smaller version of the pan you already own in the way a small saucepan is a smaller saucepan. It exists for two specific reasons, and both of them are about constraints rather than preferences.

1. It fits an oven a half sheet does not. Countertop and apartment ovens are the main case, and bakeware for toaster ovens and small ovens is where that problem is worked through properly. An 18 by 13 inch half sheet simply will not go in most of them.
2. It is the right amount of pan for one or two people. Roasting a single portion of vegetables across a half sheet wastes oven heat and gives you a large pan to wash - best pans for baking for one or two people makes that argument across the whole category.

Both reasons are dimensional. That is why this page ranks on size and on disclosure rather than on material - the material question is settled, it is the same answer as for any sheet pan, and sheet pan materials compared already answers it. Aluminum conducts; steel does not; dark coatings absorb radiant heat. None of that changes when the pan gets smaller.

What does change is that a small pan has less of everything, including stiffness. A thin quarter sheet with a weak rim will buckle in a hot oven with the same enthusiasm as a thin half sheet, and you have less metal holding it flat. Every pan on this page publishes a reinforced rim of some kind, which is why they are the six here.

The finding: quarter sheet is a name, not a dimension

The naming system is logical enough - sheet pan sizes explained sets out where it comes from: a half sheet is half a full sheet, a quarter sheet is a quarter. What the system does not do is produce pans that are the same size.

Every figure below is published by the maker on the listing we link. We did not measure anything.

Two practical consequences follow, and they point in opposite directions.

• For fitting an oven, the exterior is the number. The spread here is about three quarters of an inch in width, which sounds trivial until you remember that a countertop oven wants roughly two inches of clearance on each side for air to move. If you are close, the Nordic Ware pans are the narrow ones in length and the Fat Daddio's is the narrow one in width.
• For fitting food, the interior is the number, and the ranking reverses. Fat Daddio's publishes the largest outside and the smallest inside: an 11 1/4 by 8 inch floor in a 13 by 9 pan, because its rolled rim takes a wide bite out of each side. Nordic Ware's 12.1 by 8.8 inch interior is close to a square inch of extra floor per pan.

Nobody is being dishonest. Makers measure to the outside of the rim because that is the dimension that defines the pan. The problem is that buyers read it as the dimension that holds the food.

What each maker will put in writing

This is where the category separates, and it separates sharply. A quarter sheet gets used for roasting, reheating and broiling in a small oven - which is to say, at the top of its range. So an oven figure is not a nicety.

Three things in that table are worth saying out loud.

1. Only Fat Daddio's publishes a thickness. Gauge is the figure that predicts whether a pan stays flat and how evenly it behaves, and across this whole category exactly one maker states it. USA Pan says “heavy gauge”, which is a description rather than a measurement. Nordic Ware says nothing, which is consistent - it does not publish a gauge for its half sheet either, a gap this site has noted since launch.
2. The two published oven figures are 100F apart. Fat Daddio's publishes 550F; USA Pan's uncoated pan publishes 450F for oven and broiler. Both are bare metal with no coating to fail. There is no obvious physical reason for the gap, which means it reflects what each company is willing to warrant rather than what the metal does.
3. One brand publishes two different warranty terms in one line. Nordic Ware's bare Naturals quarter sheets are lifetime limited. Its gold nonstick Baker's quarter sheet is 10 year. The pans share a body and a rim; the coating is the obvious difference, and the listing does not connect the two.

One listing defect worth recording rather than ignoring. The Nordic Ware quarter sheet with the grid publishes a product weight of 0.0625 pounds - one ounce, for an aluminum pan plus a steel grid. It is a placeholder that was never filled, like the zero-weight and “Test Manufacturer” fields we found auditing a different brand last week. The pan is fine. The field is not a measurement, and we are not going to repeat it as though it were.

Coated, bare, or with a grid

Having settled size, this is the only remaining decision, and at this size it is genuinely different from the half-sheet version of the same question.

• Bare aluminum browns best and lasts indefinitely because there is nothing applied to it. It needs parchment or a mat for anything sticky, it darkens within weeks, and it reacts with acid. This is the default, and three of the six here are bare.
• Coated buys release at the cost of a wear surface. On a quarter sheet that trade is better than it is on a half sheet, for a reason nobody mentions: this is the pan you reheat things on, and reheated cheese, sauce and glaze are exactly what a coating is for. USA Pan's corrugated surface is the better executed of the two coated pans here.
• With a grid is a third category and the most underrated. Air under the food is what makes bacon, wings and anything breaded crisp instead of soggy, and a rack that actually fits the pan is the perennial problem - best cooling racks covers why. Buying them matched removes the problem entirely.

What a coating does not buy you at this size is a higher temperature. The only two pans here with a published ceiling are the two bare ones.

One, or two

This site argues for owning two half sheets, because the second one is what lets you roast at one temperature while something else bakes, and because a pair lets you rotate batches without waiting for a pan to cool. The argument is in best sheet pans.

At quarter size the argument is stronger, not weaker. The whole point of the size is that it suits a small oven, and a small oven is the one where you most often want two things in at once on two shelves. It is also the size where two pans nest into the space of one. Nordic Ware is the only maker here that sells them as a pair, which is most of why it leads this page.

The exception is the grid pan. One of those is enough: it does a job the plain pans cannot, and two racks is not a thing anyone needs.

Measuring your oven, in one minute

1. Measure the interior width at its narrowest point, not the door opening. Rack supports, the wall of the cavity and the heating element all intrude.
2. Subtract about two inches - roughly an inch on each side - so hot air can actually circulate around the pan. A pan that touches the walls is a pan that browns unevenly and may not come out while hot.
3. Compare that to the published exterior in the first table, not to the name on the box. At 13 inches long, the USA Pan and Fat Daddio's pans need a cavity of roughly 15 inches; Nordic Ware's 12.88 to 12.9 inch pans need slightly less.
4. If it is close, go smaller. An eighth sheet - roughly 10 by 7 inches outside - is the answer when a quarter sheet will not go in, and it is the only sheet pan size published as fitting an air fryer with shelves: the best eighth sheet pans audits the five on sale.

What we cannot tell you

How thick five of these six pans are. One maker publishes a gauge and the rest do not, so we cannot rank them on the specification that most predicts warping - and we are not going to estimate it from weight, because weight varies with the rim as much as with the sheet. Nor can we tell you what the four pans with no published oven maximum will actually tolerate; bare aluminum and aluminized steel are not fragile materials, but an unstated limit is not the same as no limit.

We have not baked on any of these. Everything above is published by the maker on the listing we link, or recorded as unpublished - how we work. And we cannot tell you what any of them cost when you click: the button carries the live number and the stamp below says when it was last checked.

Which to buy

1. Default, and for most small ovens: the Nordic Ware Naturals two-pack. Biggest usable interior, lifetime warranty, two pans.
2. You want to know what you are buying, or you broil: the Fat Daddio's SP-QTR at 18-gauge and a published 550F, or USA Pan's uncoated quarter sheet at a published 450F oven and broiler.
3. You reheat more than you bake: the USA Pan nonstick 1045QS, whose corrugated surface is the best release here.
4. You want things crisp underneath: the Nordic Ware pan with its matched grid.

Prices last checked November 12, 2026. Prices move constantly — the number on Amazon when you click is the real one.